[briandear]

Sure, but it promotes the "Silicon Valley car tech is killing people" narrative. How many times would you ever see the headline, "Old woman crushed by a Buick?" Probably never. But if it were a Tesla -- then the headline would be "Elon Musk kills old woman with a Tesla" -- or something equally ridiculous.

With the Uber self driving car story in Arizona, a human driver wouldn't have been able to avoid hitting that person -- the victim essentially committed suicide by traffic, but the "angle" of the story has continued to be some variation of "self driving cars are killers."

It's the media generating click-bait by playing to ignorance or Luddite fears.

For many years, you'd see headlines like "SUV crashes into a house and kills a small child." As if the fact that the vehicle was an SUV was material, when the actual cause was a driver who fell asleep at the wheel. But that sort of title played into the big SUV backlash that happened in the early 2000s. I never saw, "Convertible kills small child," or "Hatchback plows through a wedding, killing the groom." It was always, "SUV this" and now it's "Tesla that" or "Self-driving car this.."

Now, we see the same thing: anything "self driving," anything "Tesla" or "Uber" or anything related to those "evil" Silicon Valley people gets top billing and clicked. A local taxi driver assaulting a drunk girl wouldn't make the local news. An Uber driver being slightly rude to a pet cat would make international headlines.

"Man dies in auto accident doesn't get the emotions working like "Man murdered by an Uber driven by killer robot."